Category: X-Cart Tutorials
Posted: Feb 2, 2010
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Synopsis: Understand the strengths and weaknesses of X-Cart and how to overcome limitations of the stock x-cart.
X-Cart is a powerful e-commerce shopping cart platform written in PHP/MYSQL utilizing smarty templates, and contains numerous built-in features. As open source software x-cart can be easily customized to do anything you need by those knowledgeable in software development. X-Cart's robust features in combination with its low price point, make x-cart a great solution for your e-commerce needs.
Before you dive in and establish your x-cart store, we feel it is important to make you aware of x-cart's limitations and inform you how these limitations can be addressed by resources made available by the x-cart community.
| X-Cart can be server intensive and doesn't run well on some hosts such as GoDaddy. |
Use an x-cart recommended host as listed in our x-cart resources tutorial or run a dedicated server. |
| X-Cart is based in Russia and the language used in x-cart is not always user friendly. |
The languages are stored in variables which can be modified easily using the x-cart admin section. |
| X-Cart may not work exactly the way you want it out of the box. |
There are pre-built x-cart mods available to add additional functionality to your x-cart as well as developers in the x-cart community available for custom development. |
| The smarty templates require some programming knowledge to be able to properly implement a custom design and often to make necessary changes. |
Our x-cart tutorials, the x-cart forum at http://forum.x-cart.com, and other x-cart resources are valuable sources of information to help you understand what is necessary to manage your x-cart. |
| X-Cart frequently releases upgrade patches. |
The upgrade process is not overly difficult once you are familiar with the process, and there are also developers and development firms available to perform upgrades for you. |
| While x-cart is W3C compliant, it uses tables extensively and doesn't have the cleanest HTML code. |
You can modify your x-cart template skin to be more efficient, or install an x-cart template. |
To summarize, x-cart is a great e-commerce solution which benefits from a knowledgeable community, x-cart mods and x-cart resources, which address limitations within the stock x-cart. While x-cart comes with a low price point, be sure to leave some room in the budget for further development and x-cart mods to get the most out of your
x-cart. Also expect to do some hands-on work or pay somebody else to do so on your behalf.
